This week, something rather different from the never ending saga of Ural maintenance that makes up my weekends: How to send a lot of information into prisons via physical mail, if that pathway is still available for people in the prison you happen to care about communicating with.
Overall Concepts
I wrote some weeks back about communication into the Canyon County Jail, and as time goes on, some people have moved from the jail into the state prison system. Jail is, on paper, short term housing (not that this stops people being in jail for well over a year with literally nothing to do). Prison is long term housing, and has more to do. At least for the Idaho State prisons, they also allow quite a bit more in, in terms of written material. There’s no “two book only, undocumented, subject to the whims of the mailroom” sort of restrictions, though there are restrictions on where books can be sent from. But, to the point of this post, physical mail is actually delivered. It is not scanned and shredded - so if you send a paper, it should, in theory, actually get to the person it’s intended for.
This means that you can do things like start densely printing PDFs on thin paper and mailing them in. However, if you go about trying this, you’ll learn that there are some interesting gotchas with the process, and it’s easy to get something that’s far more difficult to read than it should be. But, fear not! I’ll guide you through how to handle this. At least if you’re on Linux… but all the tools are cross platform, so you should be fine, even if you run that “Goes to 11” advertising system most new computers seem to ship with for some reason.
I’ve settled on “quad cropped pages per page” as the best option so far. You fit 8 pages of content per sheet of paper, and it remains fairly readable for someone with normal eyesight.
Get Your Content into PDFs
I’ve played around with “printing from the web,” and I’ve not had good luck with the process. With Firefox, at least, the “Simplified” print process works okay for some sites (to include this blog), but I’ve found that it skips content in other sites, and is generally more trouble than it’s worth. If you can, copy content out from websites and print to a PDF with your preferred tool. I use Typora for this, as it’s my general markdown editor that I live in, but you can use whatever you want. On the other hand, if the “simplified” print works, and includes all the content, feel free to use it. I’ve just found that it’s far too easy to miss content when “printing straight from the web.”
Briss: Cropping PDFs
There’s a great tool called “Briss” that handles cropping PDFs down to the content, mostly automatically. You could say it “trims off the extra.” Especially when trying to densify content, you’ll want to use this. By removing the margins, you make the actual content somewhat larger when printed. This isn’t a vast difference, but it’s enough to be worth the slight hassle when putting four pages per side.
Briss is a Java binary, so install your JRE, run it, and load your PDF. Click “cancel” at the first prompt, unless you know what to do with it. You’ll see something like this. What it’s done is overlay all the odd pages on top of each other, and all the even pages on top of each other, then try to find a reasonable bounding box for the bulk of the content. The defaults are usually fine, but be aware that it tends to crop page numbers off. If you do this, fine - just be sure to manually number the pages coming off the printer somehow such that people can reorder them, if the sheets end up out of order. A quick number in the lower right hand corner by hand is usually sufficient, or you can just include the page numbers by dragging the bounding box larger.
Another quick tip: If you have a PDF that has cover pages and such, you can print it to another PDF, skipping all the unwelcome content in the middle. Make your life as easy as you can first!
Blackening Text
Another issue you’ll run into is that a lot of PDF text isn’t actually black. It’s something faintly grey that doesn’t show up as a problem when printed normally. However, when you shrink it down to quad-print, you’ll end up with something a bit weird looking. It’s readable, but it’s not right. Colored text also has the same problem with a monochrome printer. The text on the left isn’t fully filled in, and it makes it harder to read than it has to be, when compared with the fixed text on the right.
Fear not, Coherent PDF has you covered! Download the proper binary for your platform, and if you’re worried about running random binaries, this is why QubesOS is so awesome. But you’ll simply use the -blacktext option.
cpdf -blacktext input.pdf -o output.pdf
One possible downside is that you also recolor text that may be against a darker background, as shown here. But, in general, I’ve found the tradeoffs to be well worth it for the crisper main text.
Finally, Add Borders
For some content, borders don’t matter that much. For others, especially just plain text flowed into a PDF, it can help quite a bit. I’ve found that the Document Viewer in Debian has print options for this, and they work nicely. Again, not a huge deal, and it can be done without for a lot of PDFs that have an obvious natural split, but it’s something to be aware of if you need it. It really does help break up content when you’re just flowing text into quad-sections. Why not just print with a very small font? Humans do struggle with really long lines of text, so this is easier to read than the same text just shrunk down - however, if you’re tight on space, you can always send 6 point font with no margins. Just make sure it remains readable.
Page Weights and Postage
Finally, when mailing things, you need to be aware of the weight of the envelope - insufficient postage is a problem. If you don’t have a postage scale, though, I can help you out with the math, assuming you’re using US Letter size paper, and your paper weight is measured in pounds. For reasons beyond the scope of this blog post, the weight in pounds corresponds to 2000 letter sheets of paper, and there are 16 ounces in a pound (paper doesn’t work in Troy ounces). A standard sheet of 20 pound letter paper weighs (20 * 16 / 2000) = 0.16 ounces. If you’re running heavy 32 pounds paper, a sheet is 0.256 ounces. Use lightweight paper!
With USPS postal prices for first class mail, what this works out to (assuming 20 pound paper and an envelope that weighs the same as a sheet of paper) is 5 sheets of paper in an envelope for a Forever stamp, remaining under 1oz. However, two Forever stamps gets you up to 3oz - for 17 sheets of paper. You can, if you want, play with the “Extra Ounce” postage, but in practice, 16-17 sheets of paper and two Forever stamps seems to work well enough. Just make sure things are folded crisply! I’ve found that putting things in stacks of 4-5 pages and folding those, then stacking the folded versions, leads to a lower overall thickness than trying to fold 15 sheets together.
The Immerse Reading Bible
Changing gears slightly, I’ve recently discovered a new (paper) Bible format that is worth sharing: The Immerse Reading Bible, a project of the Institute for Bible Reading. It’s the Bible (New Living Translation), broken into related sections, each as a paperback book with the individual books of the Bible set up to read like books, not like the reference material some Bibles can end up feeling like. It turns out there’s a reason that Bibles use small fonts and very thin paper, and if you don’t, you end up with something that’s quite a bit thicker - which is why it’s broken into six books.
Inside, the books just read like, well, a book. If you are familiar with Bibles, you’ll notice that verse markings, chapter markings, footnotes, and all the other distractions are simply missing. All you have, as a guide, is a subtle marker at the top of the page showing you which verses are on the page. That’s it!
Why does this sort of thing matter? We’ve known for a long time now that humans, when reading, get tripped up by non-text in the flow. Verses, footnotes, all of that are a distraction to reading - and, yes, you can learn to ignore them. But it requires some mental effort to do so, and is adds hurdles that, in my opinion, really don’t need to be there.
But, worse, the (relatively recent - 13th to 16th century) addition of verses and chapters, while incredibly useful for reference and commentary, leads to a style of thinking I describe as, “The verse is the atomic unit of Bible.” People go looking around for a verse to explain or justify something, instead of the entire logically related section, and it’s rather easy to abuse this - intentionally or not. I’ve known people who were quite skilled at the art.
This isn’t helped by some translations or printings starting each verse as a new line. Out of the old Amplified, it’s really easy to internalize “Verse as atomic unit,” and even with regular reading of it, I have to regularly go back and check the punctuation at the end of the previous verse to clarify what is or isn’t a continued thought. Mine is an older printing, from the late 1980s, but it’s a common style
Even a relatively clean printing still has verse numbers and footnote markers scattered through it, and there’s always that decision you have to make - do I go look up the footnote or not? Nicholas Carr talked about this in his 2010 book “The Shallows,” and demonstrated that the distractions inherent in online text (at the time, mostly hyperlinks and non-static page locations) interfered with reading, because adding “decision points” in text just messes with human reading flow.
“Reader’s Bibles” have been a thing for a while, and I’ve been making heavy use of my ESV reader’s Bible for some coursework I’m taking, but even this one still has the problem of “very thin pages,” with substantial bleedthrough depending on the lighting conditions. There’s certainly value in having everything in one book for reference, but for general reading? I’m less convinced.
But the differences go beyond just the page formatting, and into the actual ordering of books. Quite a few of the books in the (standard Christian) Bible weren’t actually separate books - they were split up for convenience when dealing with scrolls. Immerse puts all this back together. In their layout of the New Testament, Acts follows Luke (as Luke-Acts), and Paul’s writings are generally chronological, not “longest to shortest” (mostly). In the Old Testament, 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings are combined together into Samuel-Kings as they were written. Their concept is simply to remove the artificial separations and distinctions (there are plenty of chapter breaks in the middle of thoughts) and present the text as it was originally intended - as a continuous writing, for continuous reading.
However, they also include a fairly long (typically two page) overview of each book at the start to help understand context and the general themes of each book. These are among the longest introductions I’ve seen short of quite thick study Bibles (which are great - for deep study! I have nothing against them, I just find them very difficult to simply read).
Anyway, if you’re looking for a Bible for someone, or just a different way to approach Scripture, give these a shot. I’m very, very excited that they exist, because I’ve wanted something like this for some while. I’ll also note that the covers seem well optimized to lead to people asking questions about what you’re reading, should you be reading in public.
If anyone wants a copy of Messiah (the New Testament), email me or hit me up on the discussion forum, and I’ll ship you one!
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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.sevarg.net/2025/02/09/pdf-rendering-for-prison-mail-immerse-reading-bible